Posts Tagged ‘Bible’

What books could you not bear to be without? Or, let’s rephrase that: what book would you take along with you to your desert island, along with the Bible and Shakespeare? If you were going into a home which only had room for one small bookcase, what would you absolutely have to have on it?

Any real reader will know that those are impossible questions. Where do I start? I’ve written about culling my library and how painful it is; I’m still trying to thin it out a bit so there’s room to move. And the loft is creaking under the weight of the boxes waiting to be sorted out.

Musts: Shakespeare. The lightweight single volume on bible paper will do to save space, as will my two-volume complete Jane Austen, also on bible paper. I need my complete John Donne poems, too. Dictionaries I’ll pass on, if I can have a laptop instead. I want one of my reference books to Bach’s cantatas, though, and my trusty Times Comprehensive Atlas. And I’ll have my complete Sherlock Holmes, the two-volume one to save space.

And I could stop there, I suppose, using the excuse that anything pre-1923 is available free online, again as long as I can have the laptop. That just leaves the rest of the twentieth century, literature, history and travel.

You can see that it’s a ridiculous exercise; the laptop is clearly cheating; perhaps you should try it sometime? My house would feel naked, I’d feel naked, without my library surrounding me. One day, I’ll try the exercise, allowing myself 100 books… that feels like a more sensible number. And I’ll post the list.